Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (46 page)

The Mahoney candidacy of 1937, a widely forgotten episode in the narrative of La Guardia’s triumph of reform, showed that the mayor was hardly Tammany’s only powerful antagonist. Tammany members themselves rebelled against Al Smith’s bitterness and Copeland’s turn to the right. District leaders, block captains, and rank-and-file members abandoned Copeland for Mahoney, whose campaign manager was another one of Charles Murphy’s confidants, James Gerard, a distinguished former diplomat and failed U.S. Senate candidate in 1914. Like Mahoney, they saw the New Deal as the culmination of values and policies they had supported in New York for decades. They showed that Tammany still stood for progressive politics, even if its leaders no longer did.

The mayor himself must have noticed. Two years after winning reelection, the La Guardia administration became engulfed in a police corruption scandal, leading to the indictment of a sergeant and ten lieutenants for their involvement with a crooked bail-bond operation. It was just the sort of scandal that so many had associated with the worst elements of Tammany, and not without reason.

The mayor, whose zest for shooting Tammany’s wounded was limitless, sought the services of a respected independent prosecutor to handle the officers’ case. With the press watching closely, La Guardia won great praise when he chose a Tammany district leader to head the investigation—Jeremiah Mahoney.

And so a celebrated reformer picked a Tammany ward-heeler to investigate police corruption. New York politics was a complicated business, indeed.

. . .

Barely more than a decade had passed since Governor Franklin Roosevelt opened the new headquarters of the Tammany Society in the presence of the Empire State’s most-powerful and best-known political leaders. By the early 1940s, as ward politics gave way to the urgent task of liberating the conquered nations of Europe and Asia, the Tammany building took on the musty aura of a neglected shrine. Where so recently men and women of divergent backgrounds had streamed into Tammany’s ballroom for Election Night, now there was no great rush, no great excitement, as each election cycle brought dismal returns. La Guardia would never be dislodged, and as long as he was mayor, there would be no patronage from the city. More and more jobs required civil-service tests. Another avowed enemy, Robert Moses, was in charge of parks and public works, and he was no more likely than the mayor to consider Tammany’s needs. The total of foreign-born New Yorkers plummeted to 28 percent in 1940—its lowest level, in terms of percentage, since the early nineteenth century, and far lower than when foreign-born residents made up more than half the city’s population after the great surge following the Irish Famine. Neighborhood politics that had been Tammany’s specialty seemed petty and small as Americans followed news of great battles in faraway places, with so many households wondering whether a loved one had made it through the day alive.

The iconoclastic Jeremiah Mahoney, his reputation only enhanced after his failed mayoral campaign, decided that only drastic action could save the remnants of what once was the preeminent Democratic organization in the nation. Mahoney proposed that Tammany Hall assume a new identity shorn of its colorful, controversial, and historic past. The organization, he said, should move out of Tammany Hall, the physical building owned by the technically separate Tammany Society, and reconstitute itself simply as the New York County Democratic Committee, purging all references to Tammany Hall. Members resisted, but soon the decision was made for them. The Tammany Society, the Hall’s landlords, sold the building in 1943 to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union—an implacable Tammany foe and ally of the new American Labor Party, created to attract a new breed of independent-minded leftist voters.

Tammany Hall, the political organization, cleared out of Tammany Hall, the building, and moved uptown to the fifth floor of a building on Madison Avenue. The days of ballrooms filled with cheering men and women, of Election Night visits from mayors and governors and senators, of closed-door meetings attended by loyal and discreet block captains—those days were gone. The regalia, the banners, and the flags were put away. Those who had business with the top Democratic leaders of Manhattan found few reminders of the past amid the workaday desks and file cabinets and typewriters in the party’s new headquarters. Indeed, the word
Tammany
was nowhere to be found. The door leading to the office was labeled
Democratic County Committee of New York County
.

Inside, there was just one glimpse of glory decorating the walls: a fine oil painting of Charles Francis Murphy.

. . .

So the Hall was gone. There would be a revival, even the restoration of the Tammany name, after La Guardia and Roosevelt were dead and the torch of leadership was passed to Carmine De Sapio, who in 1949 was named the organization’s first non-Irish boss since Tweed. De Sapio’s rise was yet another sign of the times, for the glory days of Gaelic Gotham were coming to an end, even as Irish immigrant William O’Dwyer captured City Hall in 1945 after La Guardia’s three memorable terms. Fewer than one in ten New Yorkers was Irish in the 1940s. The descendants of the Emerald Isle’s lost generations no longer lived on Oliver Street, where Al Smith came of age, or in the Bowery of Big Tim Sullivan, or in Hell’s Kitchen, where the McManus Club still opened its doors to those with a favor to ask or a problem to solve. Sprawling new highways were about to lead to a new promised land of picket fences and backyards, far from the reach of a block captain or a district leader. Prosperity, the dearth of new immigrants to assimilate, and the continued growth of government programs left Tammany without a mission. Indeed, its mission had been accomplished: There were fewer people in the gutter and fewer people who saw themselves as part of an urban “rabble,” as Al Smith described himself before he resettled uptown, far away from the Fulton Fish Market, the pushcarts, and the crowded tenements of his youth.

But even as its power waned in the 1940s, Tammany’s influence was so ingrained that few noticed just how much it remained a vital part of American politics. Men and women who came of age at the height of Tammany’s golden age, who saw its rough-hewn leaders not as proof of the public’s ignorance but as legitimate voices of the city’s streets, occupied places of local and national influence. Some were Tammany members, others worked cooperatively with Tammany figures, putting aside their own doubts and the contempt of their purer contemporaries. Frances Perkins, who wished she had been able to drink a beer with Big Tim Sullivan, presided over the Labor Department as the nation’s first woman cabinet member. Samuel Rosenman, lent to Franklin Roosevelt’s gubernatorial campaign in 1928 as a favor from Al Smith, continued to write the president’s speeches and serve as one of his chief advisers. Tammany member Herbert Lehman served as governor of New York until 1942 and later served as a U.S. senator. Robert Wagner remained a lion of the Senate until he retired in 1948, and his law partner, Jeremiah Mahoney, continued to remain active in New York politics, happy to tell all who would listen that Charlie Murphy’s Tammany had been at the forefront of American liberalism.

And then there was Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx—unapologetic machine politician, patronage dispenser, favor-granter, and all-round political fixer. True, he was not a Tammany member, and indeed had contributed mightily to its decline in the 1930s, but even casual observers saw in Ed Flynn the spirit of Tammany’s Charlie Murphy. “Nowadays, people who have known both men see a reflection of Murphy in almost everything Flynn does, even in the way he shakes hands,” wrote Richard H. Rovere in
The
New Yorker
in 1945.
¹⁶

Flynn ran the Democratic National Committee for three years, resigning in 1943 in preparation for his appointment as Roosevelt’s personal representative to Australia. But he withdrew his name amid a torrent of criticism for his connections to Tammany Hall and for a minor controversy over the installation of paving blocks at his vacation home in upstate Putnam County. (The blocks, which cost less than $50, were installed by city workers, which Flynn said he knew nothing about. He reimbursed the city for the expense.) “Mr. Flynn is a Tammany man,” asserted the
Chicago Daily News
as it campaigned to block Flynn’s posting to Australia. The White House was inundated with letters of protest, typical of which was one from Illinois that referred to “political scum like this fellow Flynn.” Another writer saw Flynn’s nomination as part of the Roosevelt administration’s “appeasement of the Catholic Church.”
¹⁷

FDR never came to his friend’s defense, but Flynn remained an important informal adviser to the Roosevelt White House, maintaining extensive correspondence about patronage and political intelligence with the president, his wife, and other officials. When he and his wife, Helen, visited the White House in the spring of 1944, he was shocked to find the president tired, disengaged, and irritable. After that visit, Flynn concluded that Roosevelt ought to forgo a fourth term. “I felt that he would never survive,” Flynn later wrote. He asked Eleanor Roosevelt to do her best to persuade her husband to stand down. Not long afterward, Flynn was summoned to the White House again—not to plan a retirement party but to advise Roosevelt on the suddenly urgent question of the vice presidency.
¹⁸

Throughout the summer of 1944, leading to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Flynn was absorbed in the question of Roosevelt’s running mate—and, in his view, his inevitable successor. He decided, based on conversations with his fellow political professionals (a category that did not include most New Dealers), that Henry Wallace’s continued presence on the ticket would cost Roosevelt votes and possibly the election. Flynn concluded that the increasingly leftist Wallace had become “the candidate of the radicals of the country.”
¹⁹

For Irish political professionals like Flynn, radicals of any stripe invariably were the sort of dreamers whose battles never ended well. Radicals, in Flynn’s view, were worse than dangerous. They were amateurs. Flynn knew no more damning epithet.

Ed Flynn joined with Democratic National Committee chair Robert Hannegan, a Jesuit-trained lawyer from Missouri, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago, and several other professional politicians to stage an internal coup that overthrew Wallace as Roosevelt’s running mate, replacing him with the more dependable, more professional Harry Truman, a poker-playing, straight-talking, bourbon-drinking two-term senator from Missouri. Truman rose from obscurity under the patronage of the Irish machine of Kansas City, led by Thomas Pendergast, convicted in 1939 of income-tax evasion. Truman was neither Irish nor Catholic, but, like Franklin Roosevelt, he came of age in a political culture that was both. He was not high on the list of potential nominees as Wallace’s star faded in the run-up to the convention, but as Roosevelt delivered mixed signals about Wallace, the bosses took charge. For Flynn and his allies, the choice was clear. “If you went down the list as we did, you’d have seen that it had to be Truman,” he said.
²⁰

So one of the twentieth century’s most momentous political maneuvers, the selection of Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, took place under the watchful eye of Charlie Murphy’s man in the Bronx, Ed Flynn. Tammany’s influence remained extraordinary, even in these, its dying days.

. . .

Al Smith spent his final years amid the polished splendor of Fifth Avenue, lonely and still picking at the wounds of 1928 and 1932. His friend Robert Moses made him a night watchman for the fine zoo he had built in Central Park, just across from Smith’s apartment. The old warrior had his own key to the zoo, and his neighbors would tell stories of seeing Smith pass by at night on his way to see his friends behind bars. They never let him down, they never questioned his Americanism, they never asked about the pope. They tolerated his cigar smoke, his accent, the gold in his teeth. One of his favorite animals was a tiger—and, yes, he was called “Tammany.” How could it have been otherwise? When Smith ambled across the street during regular hours and watched the children of New York gaze at the exotic beasts, he encouraged them to yell “La Guardia” at Tammany. The children were puzzled; the tiger was not. On cue, he bared his teeth. They were the only teeth Tammany had left.
²¹

Nostalgia gave way to melancholy when Smith’s wife, Katie, died in May 1944, a couple of days short of their forty-fourth wedding anniversary. A telegram from the White House arrived within hours. “I want you to know that I am thinking of you in your great loss and wish it were in my power to do something to lighten a grief so overwhelming,” President Roosevelt wrote. The years, the rivalries, and the bitterness receded with a single gesture of kindness. Smith replied weeks later with a “Dear Frank” letter, assuring him that he was in “good shape.” But he was not. He was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital in early August, suffering from heart and lung ailments. His condition became critical in early October. A dozen red roses arrived at his bedside, with notes from both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. He died hours later, on October 4, 1944, at the age of seventy. The president of the United States released a statement calling Alfred Emanuel Smith a “hero.”
²²

The organization that nurtured Smith outlived him, but not for long. In one of Ed Flynn’s last triumphs before his own death in 1953, he helped arrange Tammany support for the mayoral candidacy of Robert F. Wagner Jr., who became mayor just a few years after the death of his father, the senator. The younger Wagner was the last mayor to win office with Tammany’s approval, although that historic milestone came with an asterisk. With impeccable political instincts, Wagner ran for his third and final term as mayor in 1961 as the antimachine, antiboss, anti-Tammany candidate, a breathtaking piece of political chutzpah—and it worked. His patron, Carmine De Sapio, was defeated in a race for party district leader in Greenwich Village, meaning that he no longer had a seat in the party’s Executive Committee. No boss had ever suffered such an ignominious defeat. He tried again, and again, and both times he lost to a young, lanky, reform-minded lawyer named Edward I. Koch. A new leader, Edward Costikyan, became head of the Democratic Party in Manhattan. He was not a member of Tammany.